The Perth Metropolitan area, Peel Region and South West Region. But yes, those areas have been placed into a five day lockdown due to one person testing positive. Essential travel and work only. It’s measures like that that have kept us safe and kept COVID deaths very low.
It's a fairly incredible luxury to have whereby at the first sign of any community transmission, the state can just stamp it out. It must sound mad to someone living in Europe mind.
I agree however there's no reason why any country in the world couldn't do the same. Europe is hamstrung because the EU won't let individual countries close their borders, maybe those countires need to tell the EU to go and jump. The USA could have closed state borders to minimise the spread but they didn't. By eradicating the bulk of it quickly it means that we are able to shut down certain areas in a heartbeat. It also helps that the majority of the public are doing the right thing as well.
12 months ago I would have agreed. But governments around the world lost control pretty early on. This far into the pandemic with the level of fatigue people are feeling, I don't see it sticking unfortunately. Now the vaccine needs to be a success.
Don't know where you got that from, but it isn't true. https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-will-eu-countries-close-borders-again/a-5629880
https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/...uropean-union-hendrik-vos-annelies-verlinden/ There was an article early last week as well where the Eu stated that any country that tried to close it's borders to EU citizens needed to justify it and prove that it wasn't dicriminatory (i can't find it now but it exists)
And it’s just been in the news that police stopped a bloke today for not wearing a mask outdoors. Couldn’t give a reason for not wearing one. Cops offered him a free one there and then which he refused. Decision made to infringe him. He gave false details so that got him arrested and bail refused by the cops. Bail refusal upheld by the beak so he’s now spending 18 days in lockdown in prison. We don’t **** about here!
We are not like New Zealand at all really, apart from being an Island. We have 12 times more people living here, most in quite densely populated areas. We are a country that lives off international trade and movement, having three major international transport hubs. There are other differences of the same type, and completely locking down the country, while having some effect on transmission, would have had huge ramifications on all areas of society, from the provision of some foods, raw materials for vital industries, the movement of people inolved in these and other industries, and a staggering loss to the economy which has been battered anyway. Every country is different.
Justification has been needed for the reimposition of any level of border control within the Shengen free movement area ever since the EU rerospectively brought in the emergency legislation last February/March. This temporarily allowed the restrictions(that countries had already unilaterally implemented) in response to the emerging pandemic. Being temporary means that each one has to be renewed on a fortnightly basis. The EU was just making the best of being faced with the fait accompli of countries closing their borders with Italy. In other words the EU are maintaining the legal existence of Shengen, but the realpolitik is repeated border control and closure dependant upon prevailing coronovirus levels and fears of new variants.
If it wasn't for the fact that whatever doesn't have a deadly bite (seems to include police and the judiciary) has a deadly sting, the deadly UV levels, deadly droughts, deadly fires, deadly awful beer, deadly sheilas and deadly ****e soccer then I could quite fancy living over there!
Got to take the rough with the smooth. I blame Mrs EJK. I was all set to move to Durham with the job. She didn’t want to. Three years later we’re living over here.
Yes, closing down such low density populations is easier and more effective. Australia has only 25M people with 75% of the surface are of the whole EU! NZ has 5M in the just over the area of the UK. So stopping interactions between the populated areas is easier when there is a lot of nothing around them. Preventing border crossing in frontier areas of the EU is just not so easy as lots of people work across borders. But having a more decisive action mode doe help quite a bit
